The Don Juan Con (2003)

Sara Williams's thriller, which its jacket says is drawn from actual events and interviews with victims of romantic larceny, follows a swindler who calls himself Anthony Abruzzi and who wines and dines women from one end of the country to the other, proposes within days and vanishes with their assets before the wedding. It opens as the astrologer Maria Whitman, having found several identities in his wallet, confronts him in her house on the Banks River; when he jilts and bankrupts the designer Angie Reynolds of DeLeon, she hunts him down with the detective Joe Vensure. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex (unidentified model): The swindler checks the massive Rolex on his wrist in the first pages, allowing himself just enough time for a toast as Maria Whitman confronts him in her dressing room; he checks it again on the way to DeLeon Field, two hours and thirty-three minutes before the jet he says is his brother's, and glances at it working a mall with half an hour to closing. When Angie Reynolds is told by her banker Ned Wadlow that she paid for a Hermès case and a gold Rolex for her fiancé, which she never did, she describes them to Joe Vensure as "a Hermés case and a Rolex Presidential", and Joe suggests that another fiancée bought them. Presidential is the trade name for the Rolex Day-Date on its President bracelet, but the novel gives no model beyond Angie's word for it. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He checked the massive Rolex watch on his wrist. "Just enough time for a toast." (Sara Williams, The Don Juan Con, scan cataloged as ArcheBooks Publishing, 2003, p. 2; he checks it again on pp. 9 and 42, the bank names a gold Rolex on p. 47 and Angie calls it a Rolex Presidential on p. 58; the jacket names Anthony Abruzzi; Internet Archive scan OCR)